The Confessions of Frannie Langton

by Sara Collins

  ‘No? What was it?’

  ‘It was love.’

  There’s an outcry at that. He shakes his head. When it dies down he snaps his teeth, and makes a quick meal of me. ‘You say you came back to nurse her. Did anyone call a doctor?’

  Those words echo like a shout down a well. Call a doctor. Call a doctor.

  ‘No.’

  ‘No, what?’

  ‘No one called a doctor.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘A doctor wasn’t needed.’

  ‘You hesitate because you are lying.’

  My heart slaps, to hear him echo my own thoughts. ‘My mistress was often unwell, sir. She was an opium-eater.’

  ‘You are a fantasist. Your entire testimony has been either a deliberate distraction or plainly fictitious. You’d stop at nothing. Not even blackening her name to clear your own.’ He’s sneering now, each word rattling at me through the dock.

  ‘No.’ But my own voice has shrivelled.

  ‘It suited you to prey on her in her time of weakness.’

  No.

  He stands, waits. As if I haven’t spoken. Have I? I can no longer tell if my words have fallen inside the room, or just inside me. I lick my lips. ‘No.’

  ‘What about this?’ He taps the jar. ‘Are you responsible for this also?’

  You uncurl to my rescue, at last, and leap to your feet.

  ‘My Lord! I must object. We’ve argued this. That jar . . . there’s not one word about it on the indictment. My client is not charged with infanticide. It is prejudicial. What is the meaning of it? He must withdraw it.’

  The judge blinks up slowly. ‘Yes, I . . . agree. Mr Jessop, perhaps you should remind yourself that it is your duty to extract only those facts relevant to the charge on the indictment. To what charge does this evidence relate?’

  Jessop rocks back on his heels, pats his papers, scratches his wig, and bumps the table in his confusion. The thing inside the jar swills quietly. I stare at it, thinking that when all this is over, it’s possible that I’ll get the right punishment for the wrong thing. Time may have caught me at last. The room fills with hushed whispers and the slow smoke that smells like burning grass.

  Your hands go to your hips, taken aback by your small victory.

  I look from Jessop, up to the gallery. Gone. They’re gone. They got what they came for.

  ‘Have you done this sleepwalking trick before?’ Jessop asks, forced to swerve away from the foetus, and trying to pick up speed again.

  ‘I wouldn’t remember.’

  ‘Anyone ever told you that you have?’

  ‘Well, Mr Casterwick ‒’

  But his voice skims right over mine. ‘Mrs Linux testified that on several occasions she discovered you late at night, outside your mistress’s rooms.’

  ‘I ‒’

  ‘You weren’t sleepwalking then?’

  ‘No. I was going to see Madame. I –’

  What can I say? I was going down to her rooms. Because I wanted her. A longing so powerful it picked my feet up, drove them down the passage to her door. Made me think I was mad.

  ‘You were awake,’ he says, teeth gleaming. His mouth a trap. ‘Perfectly awake. All those other times. As you were at midnight on the night of these murders when you walked towards your mistress’s rooms. And when, shortly after that, you stabbed her to death.’

  ‘I was asleep,’ I say in my shrunken voice.

  He gives a shrug of a smile, like a jacket he’s trying on. ‘But everything you say is a fiction. The invention of a mind scrambling to save itself. Why should these gentlemen believe a word of it?’

  Oh. Then my knees melt. I remember Linux shaking me awake into the cloud of her breath in the cold room. Her face a puddle in the half-dark. I remember she cried, Murderer! Murderer! and the constable said, ‘Dress now, we must have you downstairs at once,’ and his voice swam to me, but I couldn’t lift my arms or my legs. He was a heavy man with a raw-looking face, black in the door frame. Black eyes, black-hatted. I saw a shadow taking shape beside me, which I then saw was Linux. There was blood on my hands, and the bedcovers too. She pinched me, hissed, ‘You’re to come downstairs!’

  Jessop’s questions hammer and hammer at me, drive me like a nail inside myself. I’m in the prisoner’s dock, but also in her room, in her bed. The covers, the nightstand, the woman in red. And I can’t bear to look at her, can’t bear to hear that she is dead. I try to cover my ears.

  Sleep, Frances. Sleep.

  Jessop swivels to look at the jurors before his next question, his face lit with satisfaction. ‘Mrs Linux also testified that you locked your mistress in her rooms, on occasion. What do you say to that?’

  ‘I did not.’

  ‘You terrorized her, during the days leading to these murders. Didn’t you?’

  I laugh, though I know I’ll seem like a Bedlamite. ‘How?’ My mind gone syrup-slow. ‘How? How would I have done that?’

  No, I want to say. I want to laugh, to scream, to shout it out. She terrorized me.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  It ends as it began. With Jessop’s snapping gown, his ship’s horn of a voice.

  ‘Gentlemen, I’ve never seen a more straightforward case. Not in all my years.’

  I’m too tired now to hold myself upright. But I have to. I must listen, until the end.

  ‘My friend, Mr Pettigrew ‒ more a learned friend than a sensible one ‒ has done his best.’ He smiles down at you, where you sit fidgeting with the pink ribbon on your brief. ‘He has tried to harangue you with all kinds of nonsense. But when you blow his puffery away, what is left? Nothing. Sleepwalking! Sleepwalking and amnesia!’ He snorts. ‘Perhaps he should take up the pen, gentlemen . . . One might well say he’s as much of a fantasist as his client! Perhaps he, too, has been taken in by her. Like Mr Benham was.’ He shakes his head. ‘But, gentlemen, in this court, we trade in fact.

  ‘The notion that sleepwalking could explain these crimes, let alone excuse them, that would be a murderer’s charter!’

  It speeds up now. All eyes turn to the judge. His quill drips over his papers as he speaks, ink crawls across them, and his clerk reaches up to move them to the side, just as he’s been serving him, tenderly, quietly, attentively, the whole way through.

  The judge turns to the jurors. ‘Gentlemen, you are now charged with considering what you have seen and heard and delivering your verdict. It is true that, as a matter of English law, murder must always have that constituent part, malice aforethought and that, in our law, malice aforethought requires consciousness. If you believe the prisoner did in fact commit these crimes, but without that requisite degree of consciousness, because she laboured under a state of mind that was so disordered as to deprive her of responsibility, then that would be akin to automatism, which Mr Pettigrew mischievously suggests must have the same effect as the defence of insanity. To wit, the essential element of malice aforethought would not be there and the charge would not be made out. It is a novel argument, but it is one which it is your misfortune to have to trouble yourselves with.’

  You look up, give a small shake of your head. You’ll fume later about his choice of words – mischievous, misfortune – but you make no objections while they’re being said.

  ‘I know it has been a long trial,’ he continues. ‘I leave it to you to put an end to it.’

  Then, time bearing down on me, catching me at last. The past, the present, the future, all at once.

  Newgate Prison

  Chapter Forty-Six

  There’s one more story left to tell.

  21 October 1824

  Male infant of Paradise plantation, 10 months old or thereabouts.

  Length of body: 26 inches

  Circumference of skull: 17 in

  Weight: 16 lbs

  Born to Calliope, 20, Negress, bought off Montpelier estate, Antigua, from Mr Buxton Hardy, together with her infant, by Mr John Langton, Paradise estate, Jamaica.

  Head and skin covered
in a pale down fuzz. Skin dry and firm. Suet-like complexion but normal colour in the gums. Nose, flat. Hair, woolly. Broad, flat features of the Negro. Eyes disproportionately placed, asquint. But complete lack of pigmentation in skin and eyes defies racial origins. An albino. Intend to conduct examination, as Buffon did with his white nègresse, Geneviève. Believe it will be possible to contradict his supposition that the condition is a degenerative fluke. To begin with, examination of skin specimens is proposed. Thereafter the child will be kept for further extensive study.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  The baby was asleep on the table. I could hear its mother outside, scratching at the door. As if that would tell him she was there. It was a relief when it stopped, but it always started again.

  Langton had sent for her as soon as the pair of them arrived. Bought in from Antigua, thanks to Pomfrey. ‘Bring me that pickney tomorrow. You hear?’ Switching to Creole talk, same way he always did with his slaves. ‘I’ll let you sabi when you can come get him back.’

  She wrung her hands. ‘How long, Massa?’

  Three full days, so far. But I’d seen the papers in his skull-cupboard. He was selling the mother on. Cart was coming for her in the morning, she just didn’t know it yet. He was going to keep the child. For observation, he said.

  ‘What for?’ I’d asked.

  ‘To note the limits of its intelligence, identify its capacity for learning.’

  Same thing that pair of demons had been doing with me.

  He only made me take the usual measurements, to start with, watched me snapping the calipers open, fixing them in place, slapped at them when I didn’t work fast enough. I curved my palm over the span of the baby’s head, the pale frizz of its hair. Protecting it. From him, from me. Startled when he spoke again.

  ‘Skin,’ he said. ‘Let’s get on with it.’

  With the Surgeon dead, I’d had to learn dissection, whether I liked it or not. What would Benham have written about any of this, if I had told him? Certainly not how I quailed, looking down at that child. How I felt my stomach curl. How panic thickened my breath. Ahead of me lay the same two choices as always. Do what Langton wanted, or do what I wanted.

  Not this, not this. Please not this.

  I lifted the scalpel, set it down again, knotted my hands together.

  I would never be able to confess it to anyone. But it wouldn’t matter whether I confessed or not because I would know.

  Oh, I stated my objections. The child was too young, should not be separated from his mother; the coach-house wasn’t a place to keep an infant; how did he think he could raise one in there? And on and on. But to no avail. ‘This is the worst thing you’ve asked of me,’ I said.

  ‘Pickney going hardly feel it,’ he replied.

  My head crowded with things he’d said over the years.

  Blacks don’t feel pain. It’s what makes them so well suited to the work.

  God doesn’t waste good souls in black bodies.

  George Benham is forced to come to me, for a change. All this data flowing from colonial laboratories.

  Look at you. Even you. Proving that the principal thing you’re made for is following my instructions.

  Only God knew what else lay in store for that child, but I didn’t want to find out.

  The scalpel had slipped. Plunged into my own hand. Hardly a surprise, the way they shook.

  The baby cried and cried, and could not be consoled. Langton leaped to his feet. ‘Careful! Careful. Idiot girl! Can’t afford to lose him.’ Not for the first time, I knew he’d gone mad, and felt I’d gone mad with him. I looked him dead in the eye, holding my injured hand.

  ‘I cannot do this.’

  In response, he kissed his teeth. It had never been about what I could do, just what I would.

  But, mercifully, the accident convinced him to pause. Give me time. ‘Put yourself back together,’ he said, nodding at the cut on my hand.

  Water. Bandages. A tincture, to calm the child. Nothing could calm me.

  Afterwards, Langton had spent the afternoon studying Helvetius and Voltaire. Their notes on their own examinations of white Negroes, Helvetius’s speech concerning ‘the little white born to black parents, who displayed a limited intelligence’.

  Now he was pulling the infant’s toes apart to squint between them. I’d never seen anything whiter than that baby. Whiter than a frog’s belly. Whiter than a bucket of skimmed milk. Eyelashes pink as gums.

  I went over to the basin, scooped some water up to scrub across my cheeks, let it seep through my fingers, numb my face. Stared at him down the long length of the room.

  The space was heavy with the smells of lime and gunpowder, the syrupy light of the candles on the table, darkness spilling like water into the space around them. Silence rang loud as church bells in my head. The baby twitched its foot out of Langton’s quivering hand.

  I hated his hands. His work-starved fingers. His nails, which I was required to cut. Hated that I’d once stood in that same spot undoing my own buttons yet he’d said not one word about why I should not. How I had hated him for that.

  I hated him with my whole soul, but I was stitched to him. Therefore, worst of all, I hated myself.

  How he made me look inside all those bodies.

  I hated the man named Benham, who had given him the idea.

  Now that I look back on it I realize Miss-bella had taught me for spite, but he had finished it for the same reason. That day he made me swallow those pages, he must have known he’d found the very thing he needed, to tempt Benham’s interest.

  I went over and lifted the child away. He woke with a startle. I could hear his mother, through the door, trying not to sound angry, trying to sound like she was begging, instead. ‘You took my baby. Thought you supposed to give him back? What you doing to him?’

  Hate twisted in my chest. And dread, too. Of the next day, and what would be expected of me. And of the day after that.

  Langton said he was going back to the house, told me to keep an eye on the child. I had to grind my teeth not to answer him.

  The baby was warm as a chick, staring up at me, sucking on the heel of its hand.

  Dundus. That’s what the others would call it. Nothing but bad luck. They thought I was bad luck too ‒ another malformed creature. Coo ’pon her! Drifting ’tween that porch and that coach-house. Like she own the place! That passel of dried-out old goosetail feathers in the crook of her arm, like firewood. Like she forget she a slave. She a neger, for all she might talk white.

  I listened to the scratching at the door.

  Then I crouched next to it, and spoke. That silenced her. ‘Tomorrow. Wait for the house to go dark. Then wait an hour. Find a clock. Beg one, thief one. Go get him from down next to the bridge. Get him quick. Don’t know where you can go after that. That’s going to be your problem. Whatever you do, don’t bring him back.’

  Next night, down to the coach-house, Langton and Miss-bella asleep. Started with the cabinet, stood back to let the torch press against the window sashes. I had to take myself back to the house quick, after that, but I stopped on the path, just for a moment, and let myself look. The smoke came in small fists, then slackened out into the night air. The wood burning clean. The sight of it froze me where I stood, struck such a queer chime in my heart. Swarms of ash spooled up out of it, like small black birds.

  Intention had flown in, when I’d held that baby. I knew I was going to set that fire. Spring myself from that trap.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  I feel as if I’ve been struck a blow. The judge droops the black cloth over his wig. He glances across at me. I grip the railing tight, because otherwise my hands will fly away. All my limbs will fly away, all parts of me. I can’t look at you, couldn’t bear to see one of your careful smiles, or, worse, nothing at all. I can hardly hear the judge’s words. I must keep my eyes on his face. There’s still hope, until a thing happens, that it could happen a different way. But then it happens and it is nothing but
memory.

  The jurors’ verdict echoes while we wait. I allow myself to look at you. You sit, and stare straight ahead, like a man at a tomb. I follow your gaze and see that you’re staring at the stone columns behind the judge’s bench, at the sword, at the gold letters.

  The truth is that I am a murderer.

  ‘Frances Langton,’ says the judge. ‘The scriptures say that whoever spills a man’s blood, his blood shall also be spilled. I have no choice but to give you the sentence of the law. I hope you will make use of your short time remaining on this earth and repent, and I pray that the example you are about to set by your suffering might have a good effect on others and deter them from committing the same grievous sins. In saying so, there is nothing left for me to do but to pass on you the dreadful sentence which the law requires and direct that you, Frances Langton, be taken from here to the place whence you came and thence to the place of execution where you will be hanged from the neck until you are dead.’

  There is a spinning in my head, and a mewling, and then nothing but the quiet, desperate beating of my own blood.

  I’m sorry.

  I realize I’ve said it out loud. I’ve shouted. I’ve yelled.

  I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Then, night squeezing in. Gaol-birds calling. The rattle of hearts in all those cages. Worst of all the way I shake and shake, like laughing, and cannot stop. Asking for laudanum. Begging. Give me just a thimble. A lick. The turnkey, laughing, shifting his breeches with his hand. Oh, they can get you anything, if you give them a mind to do it. But there’s a price. There always is.

  If he leaves me alone, if he leaves me with nothing, I will see them. Snipping roses down to their blunt red heads. Pearl handles winking.

  Morning comes, whether you want it to or not. The keys tell me you’re here. ‘You slaughterhouse hens, nothing but callers.’

  I straighten my bedding, though there’s that awful quake in my hands. But maybe you’ve brought me something, some wisp of hope.